''Big push industrialization: some empirical evidence for East Asia and Eastern Europe''

( 2003, Vol. 15 No.9 )

In this paper we examine some testable implications of growth theories based on threshold externalities and complementarities. Specifically, we use industry data for a set of eight emerging economies in East Asia and Eastern Europe to perform general tests of the big push industrialization hypothesis of Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989). The preliminary results reported here are generally supportive of the theory. They also suggest that government policy may have played a role in moving an economy from a "bad" to a "good" equilibrium.